“You mean you’re hard to bully, because you soar effortlessly into regions where bullies can’t reach you?”
“I never heard it put quite like that,” said Lotty, “but I expect you’re right.”
Claire had a brief vision of the late Mrs. Tennant, on fire with wrath, encountering this cool, insulated young girl. It must have brought down her temperature considerably.
“And this,” Lotty said, opening another door, “used to be our sitting-room. I turned it into a studio.”
Claire followed her in, looked round, and once again found herself speechless.
They were in a large, lofty room with windows facing north south and east. With difficulty, there could be traced signs that this had been the sitting-room that Lotty had named it; there were two china cabinets, a sofa and chairs, and in an alcove corresponding to that of the dressing—room, a large, littered desk with a window to right and left of it overlooking the garden. And everywhere, lining the walls, propped on tables and chairs and sofa, standing on a large easel, leaving scarcely enough room for anybody to move about, were pictures—pictures painted on wood, the smallest of them large enough to have covered half Claire’s bedroom wall at home. There were brushes, rows of jars, innumerable tubes of paint, and a litter of unfinished sketches.
“A studio,” said Lotty, “ought to have a north light, I suppose, but I like working in here.”
“How long—” began Claire in a dazed voice.
“I’ve always painted, but just before Grant went to Canada, he said I ought to paint seriously and try to earn some money. Pierre prepared the wood for me. I hadn’t realized what fun it would be to do work on a larger scale. But when I had a small local exhibition, nobody bought anything.”
Claire was not surprised. She was staring, fascinated, at the pictures as Lotty turned them round.
“Sea,” Lotty explained, gazing at an enormous waste of grey-green. “You live near the sea, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Claire said, and wanted to add that no sea she had ever seen had looked like that.
“Autumn,” Lotty said, of several square yards of reddish brown. “And more sea. Mostly, I paint seas.”
With deep relief, Claire saw that no comment was expected of her; Lotty had floated away, rearranging the pictures in a manner that made it clear she had forgotten anybody was in the room with her.
“Has Grant,” Claire asked, recalling her after a time, “seen them?”
“Grant? Oh yes. When he came down for the week-end, just before his mother died, I showed him what I’d been doing.”
Claire would have liked to have heard his and Mrs. Peel’s opinions, but when eventually she and Lotty returned to the drawing-room, it was to find Mrs. Peel taking a brisk leave of Ronnie and going up to bed.
“I have to be up early,” she explained to Claire, “and like my sleep. Grant’ll see you up to your room. Lotty, see Ronnie out.”
Ronnie, who had clearly been hoping to settle down again on Mrs. Peel’s departure, made his reluctant farewells and followed Lotty to the front door. Grant went upstairs with Claire and at the door of her room took her in his arms and laid his cheek on her hair.
“I looked at you across the table at dinner,” he murmured, “and I wondered how you could have fallen in love with me. I tried to imagine you married to me . . . Claire, you do love me?”
She assured him that she did, but the draughty corridor with its plum-coloured strip of carpet and butter-coloured walls did not seem to her to encourage a tête-à-tête. She let herself into her room and undressed, but as she got into bed and put out the light, it was not of Grant she was thinking, but of his mother. Her mind revolved round the Will and the letter, and then wandered to Mrs. Peel and Lotty and the seascapes. She thought of Richard Tennant, who did not seem to be in a hurry. She thought of her own—it now seemed to her—inexplicable stupidity in not having urged Grant to get rid of this mausoleum of a house. Nothing would ever persuade her that she could live happily in it; she had been crazy to bring Grant back.
She did not know whether she had slept or not—but suddenly she was wide awake, listening with a thudding heart to sounds outside the window. She heard scraping, and a thud, and the fall of pebbles, and then to her horror saw silhouetted a man’s figure.
She jerked herself to a sitting position, but even as she did so, her fear receded. Burglars did, of course, climb through windows, but they didn’t sit astride them, swear out loud and lean down to haul in a suitcase. If they did, it would be an empty suitcase to be filled with loot, and not, as now, an obviously heavy one.
She put out a hand and snapped on the light, and the low series of imprecations ended on an exclamation of surprise.
“Good Lord!”
For some moments the man stayed where he was, taking in the room with a leisurely gaze.
“Somebody,” he remarked casually at last, swinging his leg into the room and standing up to brush his clothes, “has been sleeping in my bed.”
“I’m sorry. Mrs. Peel said you’d been moved,” Claire told him. “That is, if you’re Richard.”
“I am. The bed,” he went on, still intent on his study of the room, “should have been left where it was—against that wall. It looked better as a man’s room. And you”—his glance rested on her; absently, he picked up a woollen jacket that lay on a chair, and threw it across to her—”you’re of course Claire. How’s Grant? No, don’t answer that; I’ll find out how Grant is when I see him. Mrs. Peel must be glad to have him down here at last.” He sat on the end of the bed. “Why didn’t he come down before?”
“He didn’t want to.”
“I can understand that—but it’s been a long time. I’ve been waiting for an invitation to your wedding—I’ve brushed my best man’s attire every day for months. I was chosen, but not called.”
There was a pause. She found that his complete lack of self-consciousness had communicated itself to her, leaving her free to make a frank study of him. He came to her assistance.
“Six feet two, very dark, owing to French blood on mother’s side. Lean and in good shape except for slightly damaged ankle caused by recent ski accident. Not handsome, but not repulsive. I.Q. a bit above average, probably to make up for his sister’s, which is a bit below. Disposition tricky; character . . . well, it depends where you go for a reference. If you’d asked the late lamented—when I say lamented, I’m not, of course, speaking personally—she would have told you I was half Borgia and half Machiavelli. Mind if I smoke?”
“I don’t mind the smoke, but I’d rather you didn’t settle down for a cosy chat at this time of night.”
“Morning. One-thirty. The car papers held me up, and I decided to have dinner in town. Then I ran into a girl I knew, and we did a show. Then I made my secret entrance. That was the reason I chose this room; it was the only window she couldn’t keep an eye on.”
“If you’re talking about Grant’s mother—”
“Who else would be interested in my nocturnal comings and goings? I used to try to persuade Grant to join me, but by the time he and I became acquainted, virtue had taken a strong hold on him. Besides which, his window was bang next door to his mother’s. Death,” he ended lightly, “has relieved you of a very heavy burden.”
“She’s dead,” Claire reminded him, and saw him shrug—the first reminder of a French strain.
“I voiced my opinion of her, loudly and clearly, when she was alive,” he pointed out. “What’s more, I voiced it to her.”
“You must have made things very easy for your father.”
He considered this.
“In a way,” he acknowledged, “I suppose I didn’t. But I spent as little time here as I could and I don’t think it was entirely my fault that his wife couldn’t bear the sight of me.” He paused. “Grant said something in his letter that surprised me—which was that you wanted to keep this house. Do you?”
“No.”
“Then—”
“I didn’t
think the real point was whether I wanted it or not. I felt he ought to make his own mind up.”
“It seems a pity,” he commented, “not to have taken the opportunity of getting him right away from it. Does he talk about his mother at all?”
“He doesn’t like talking about anything that reminds him of what she did—but he doesn’t believe she meant it to be her last Will.”
“Well, that’s my opinion, too,” he said. “I don’t think she meant it to be as final as it proved to be. She was a woman who’d be capable, in certain moods, of wiping everybody except Grant out of her will and coming back and telling them—just to see their faces. I don’t think she meant that to be her last Will and Testament—but it was. It shook me, I can tell you, to realize that at the exact moment she went hurtling down those stairs, I went crashing down the ski slope. I’m not given to flights of fancy, but I’m a first-class performer on skis and I shall never understand how I came down so hard. I wouldn’t like to feel that when she felt herself going, she tried to take me too.”
“Did you hate one another,” she asked, “as much as that?”
“Big word, hate,” he commented. “Possibly she hated me. I didn’t hate her. At least, I don’t think so. I used to forget her completely until I came into this house; arriving, I’d tell myself that this time, I was going to exercise a saint’s patience and self-control. Next thing, she’d rasped my nerves like somebody’s nails going across a tablecloth—and we were at it. But not seriously until my father died.”
“You needn’t have come back after he died, need you?”
“Haven’t you forgotten Lotty?”
“She was married—widowed; she chose to live here.”
“Lotty,” he said, “doesn’t choose. Lotty has to be chosen for. And that was where the late Mrs. Tennant and I first fell out. I came here for the first time after my father’s marriage to her, to find her trying to team up Lotty and Grant. I don’t have to tell you that tying those two up would have been a disaster of what’s called the first magnitude. So I stopped it.”
“Why?”
“I’ve told you why: because each of them needed, needs, firm underpinning. Married to Grant, Lotty would never have got away.”
“But she didn’t go away when she married Geoffrey Summerhill.”
“Geoff would have taken her away if it hadn’t been for the fact that—to everybody’s surprise—his godmother took a strong fancy to young Paul. That meant—Geoff thought—a rosy future for a small boy; far rosier than Geoff could have provided. Geoff stayed—but he never gave in to his godmother, as Grant gave in. If she’d gone too far, he would have taken Lotty and Paul away—so she didn’t go too far.”
“You were here that last week-end,” Claire said slowly. “You—”
“Correction: I was here for exactly fourteen hours. I came late on Saturday night. I saw Mrs. Tennant just after breakfast on Sunday morning, had a blazing row, walked out, caught a plane and was skiing the next day.”
“Would the row have had anything—”
“No. We fell out, as we always did, over Lotty. She told me with the utmost satisfaction that she’d ordered Ronnie Pierce off the place. Then she said that she intended to leave Lotty and Paul a half-share in the house. I told her she could keep the whole of the house, and that if she didn’t remove the ban on Ronnie Pierce, I’d take Lotty and young Paul back to Paris with me. And so I would have done; it was clear she’d made up her mind to keep Lotty here permanently. So that was the row. I left, and the next news I had was that she was dead.”
“Perhaps whoever sent that letter—”
“What letter?”
“Mrs. Peel said that Mrs. Tennant was all right on that first morning—until she’d read her letters. She’ll tell you about it.”
“You tell me about it.”
“At about eleven o’clock, she saw Mrs. Tennant writing a letter—and there was another letter in front of her which Mrs. Peel thought she was answering. She was terribly angry.”
“They must have found the letter, or letters, when she was dead.”
“They didn’t.”
Once again he shrugged.
“Theorizing,” he said, “doesn’t get us anywhere. I’m more interested to know what Grant’s going to do.”
“You know what he’s going to do. He’s going to let you decide for him.”
She saw his glance resting on her, and realized that it was a penetrating one.
“I never know,” he commented slowly after a while, “why men got typed as the strong sex. Every doctor’ll tell you that, physically, they’re the weaker. But a man, because he's a man, is expected to justify his manhood by acting like Alexander the Great and Hannibal rolled into one. Did you fall in love with Grant? You did. Why? Because he was shy and quiet and gentle, and because any girl of sense would know him for the decent chap that he is. But now you want to turn him into something quite different.”
“I don’t.”
“I’m glad you don’t. It sounded to me as though you did.” He rose, yawned and stretched. “I suppose you wouldn’t have anything to eat and drink up here?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll go downstairs and see what I can find.” He picked up his suitcase. “Why did you put off your wedding for so long?”
“Grant hasn’t been in a marrying mood.”
“He couldn’t have seen you looking as you do now. Well... sleep well.”
“If nobody else walks in through the window, I might. Good night.”
“Good morning. To be exact, one-forty-three. Didn’t seem as long as that. See you at breakfast.”
The door closed softly behind him, and she took off the jacket and put out the light and lay back in the darkness trying to sort out her impressions. They had all been waiting for him, and he had come—through her window. Mrs. Peel feared his influence, Mrs. Tennant had hated him, Grant loved him, Lotty depended on him. She herself . . . She would wait and see.
Chapter 4
Breakfast was laid in the dining-room, but Claire found nobody eating, and no sign of food. She stood hesitating for a moment, and Richard Tennant came in cautiously and drew her outside.
“Come and walk for a bit; it’s a nice morning—and breakfast will be late. I ate it last night, purely by mistake, Lotty’s in bed; I didn’t disturb her. Grant was in bed, and 1 pulled him out—not gently. So let’s get out and breathe some good air.”
She paused at the front door.
“I ought to go and help Mrs. Peel,” she said.
“Don’t you go near her; she’s not in a sociable mood,” he warned her. “When I left you last night, this morning, I looked for food and found a pork pie. I don’t care for pork pies, especially Mrs. Peel’s pork pies, but I was hungry. This morning she informed me, not politely, that it was meant for breakfast.”
He was leading her uphill; down, he explained, was depressing; up offered a good view. They reached the top and stood looking across a wide stretch of country.
“How far away do you live?” he asked.
“As the crow flies, quite near, but by the time you’ve meandered through secondary roads from Kent into Sussex, it’s almost as quick to go up to London and down again.”
“So that’s why Grant decided to live in London. How did you meet?”
“At a dance.”
“That’s what makes dances a perpetual hazard. ‘One day, across a crowded room’ is right. Your father’s an invalid, isn’t he?”
“Semi.”
The house looked a long way below them. Up here, there was a strong breeze blowing and she sniffed it appreciatively. Her dress billowed and her hair streamed behind her.
“I used to come up here to cool off,” he said. “That was in the early days, when I tried to keep my father out of rows. I always find it odd to think that he died here after having lived all his life in beautiful surroundings. But I suppose he was glad to end up in English soil.” He turned to look at her. “Do you go for
pre-breakfast walks at home?”
“No. Pre-breakfast swims in summer, sometimes. There’s a path that takes you straight down to a little beach. I have it entirely to myself.”
“Why is that an attraction?”
She laughed.
“It makes all the difference between going up and down in a bathing suit—or not. Besides which…”
“Besides which—?”
“I was thinking about friends. I had a lot when I left school, but most of them are married, or working, or abroad. If you don’t marry early and make a new set of friends, it seems to me that you get left on a sort of island—all by yourself. It doesn’t worry me much; when I marry Grant, I suppose there’ll be a new set. I was only answering your question about aloneness. And anyway, since meeting Grant I seem to have grown away from the friends that were still around.”
She could understand his urge to come up to the top of this hill and escape from Mrs. Tennant. Though the house was not far below them, and though the outskirts of the town were almost at their feet, there was a sense of isolation on this green height.
“Over there”—he pointed—“is Paul’s school. We’ll be going to fetch him later on.”
“What’s he like? I mean, is he like Lotty?”
“Not very much. I can see myself in him a bit—he’s got my way of not seeing things coming until they hit him. Like me, he goes along doing—he thinks—no harm to anybody, and then discovers he’s given offence all round. Like the pork pie. I wouldn’t have eaten it if there hadn’t been stacks of other food in sight, but as there was plenty, I ate the pie—et voilà—it’s the pie, the very pie, the particular and prize pie that was meant for our breakfast. I don’t think I’m selfish, but I think I’m stupid about other people’s points of view; I pursue what seems to me to be a sane and logical course, or I make what seems to me a perfectly natural and sensible remark—and find myself in trouble. As now. I think that’s how Paul’s going to turn out. Perhaps that’s why we get on well together. And also why Paul gets on so well with Ronnie Pierce. Ronnie’s a man who hasn’t any prickly side; he takes things—and people—as he finds them. He doesn’t even bear Mrs. Tennant any grudge for throwing him out.” He frowned, and went on speaking after a pause during which he seemed lost in thought. “Lotty refused him last night. She’s crazy.”
Letter To My Love Page 6
